


The Harder to Get, The Better to Have

by Geekhyena



Category: Newsflesh Trilogy - Mira Grant
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Girls with Guns, Misses Clause Challenge, Origin Story, Pre-Canon, Spot the Film References!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 14:35:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geekhyena/pseuds/Geekhyena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What was Becks' life like before she joined After the End Times? A series of snapshots from the life of Becks Atherton.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Harder to Get, The Better to Have

**Author's Note:**

  * For [walkthegale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/walkthegale/gifts).



> Mira Grant (*cough* Seanan McGuire *cough*) created the world and characters therein. I just play with them. Thanks also go to popelizbet who was an awesome beta. To carawj, I hope you enjoy this!

=============

Rebecca Atherton is two when her mother catches the nanny calling Rebecca “Becka”. Following the firing of said nanny, Mrs. Atherton explains to the staff that diminutives were inappropriate for her children, and that they are not to be tolerated. Rebecca was Rebecca, not “Becky,” not “Becka,” not “Reba.” Katherine was Katherine, not “Kitty,” not “Kate,” not “Kat.” Michaela was Michaela, not “Kayla”, not “Kaylee,” and certainly not “Mickey,” and so on for Elizabeth and Kristina. She had given her girls proper names - names that conveyed their place in society - and she would not permit diminutives. The next time Alexandra Atherton, nee Alexandra Feldstein, hears her daughter refer to herself as “Becka,” she gives her daughter a concise but firm message on the power of names, and why nicknames were fine between family members, but we don’t allow others to call us by them, and thus imparts upon Rebecca not only her first explicit lesson in class distinctions, but also in image management.

=============

Rebecca is four, and she is riding a horse for the first time. It is in a tightly enclosed arena,with blood tests required to leave and enter, and the horse is a placid pony that allegedly answers (but in fact, doesn’t) to the name Buttercup, but it is riding nonetheless, and a rarity in a world where most people are too scared of large mammals to ever come near one, let alone ride one. But the aristocracy has its Expectations, and they are not going to let something like a zombie apocalypse change their way of life too much - they have enough money to make the world conform to their rules, or at least, to pretend it is so. 

And so Rebecca learns to ride, just like her sisters have, and can comport herself well on a horse while looking stunning in a riding costume that costs more than most people make in six months. But every time she asks her parents if she could ride outside, like she has seen some people still doing on TV, or like in the pre-Rising books she reads, they always refuse, adding that she is a lucky girl to be even allowed to ride at all, and she should be grateful for that. This is when Rebecca first learns that even for her, freedom has its limits.

=============

Rebecca is six, and her aunt Lisa is getting married to the real estate mogul Marcus Clyne, known for buying up massive amounts of property during the Rising. Real estate prices had plummeted when certain sections of the US had been rendered temporarily uninhabitable, but he had sat on those investments until the zombies had been cleared out, and had made a fortune renting and selling them. He is nouveau riche, everyone agrees, but he satisfies the proper criteria: white, good-looking, and smart, and so the Feldsteins offer up one of their daughters as a sacrificial lamb so that the family wealth and connections may increase. It’s how business has been done for generations: one way of how the world’s plutocracy keeps wealth and renown firmly in their hands, and it is what Rebecca’s destiny will be too, if her parents have their way.

Rebecca knows none of this, of course. All she knows is that she is buttoned into a frilly pink dress that snags and itches, and along with her sisters and cousins, trotted to the front of Temple Beth Elohim while her aunt marries a man with too-perfect teeth whose smile never quite reaches his eyes. At the reception, people comment on what a perfect little doll Rebecca is, with her hair in blonde ringlets to her waist and the daintiest of white patent leather shoes on her feet. Mrs. Worthington-Huff introduces her to her son William, and as the two children play, their mothers comment on how cute they look together. Matchmaking among the upper classes begins early.

=============

Rebecca is seven, and William Worthington-Huff’s nose is bleeding. It is Rebecca’s older sister Elizabeth’s birthday party, and Rebecca’s family has an expansive, if extremely well-fenced, backyard for the children to play in. Rebecca has just begun archery lessons, this being considered an appropriate hobby for young ladies of her social standing, and when Rebecca speaks longingly of wanting to take additional marksmanship classes, going beyond the simple handgun upper class-ladies carry as a last resort against any zombies that might make it through the ever-present security teams, William says that big guns are for boys and girls aren’t strong enough to handle stuff like that. He adds, in the mocking tone of a boy who is explaining things to a girl he perceives as dumb, that girls would worry about chipping their nail polish on the trigger and drop the gun the first time they actually saw a zombie, because girls are dumb and can’t fight. 

Her fist finds his nose shortly afterward, and soon the two children are tussling in the backyard. By the time the security team pulls them off of each other, William’s nose is bleeding and he has the beginnings of a black eye, and Rebecca has grass stains on her formerly-pristine white socks and pink sweater, and her jeans are torn. Rebecca is treated to a long lecture on the importance of being ladylike and how women of her social class do not use weapons or tussle like back-alley brawlers, but the next time she sees William, he refuses to meet her eyes and avoids her thereafter. Her mother scolds her, but Rebecca doesn’t care. Even at such a young age, she has realized that who she wants to be and who her family wants her to be are two very different people.

=============

Rebecca is ten, and has claimed her parents’ film room as hers. Streaming video had been popular before the Rising, and after the multiple incidents involving movie theatres, most people watched new films from their homes, delivered via high-speed internet. Her parents took it a bit further - a whole room in their mansion, set up like one of the pre-Rising movie theatres, but smaller, a sound system worth more than most people’s cars, and access to almost any film, pre- or post-Rising. Any time not spent at school, or archery lessons, she is in the film room. She discovers a love for the language of film - the way each shot is set up, timed, and choreographed; the way facial expressions blend with music and dialogue to convey complex themes; the way the best films can transcend culture and time and be just as important today as they were when they were released - she loves it all.

Her first blog, The Language of Light and Motion, is a collection of her thoughts on the films she loves so much. Her parents hear the artistic nature of her thoughts on the films, and think that perhaps this passion can be trained into something respectable. They do not understand that her blog is connecting her to people so far outside her cozy, managed world that they might as well be from another planet entirely. They do not understand that Rebecca is learning what lies outside the carefully-constructed illusion of the rich, and even if they did, they would never imagine that she would prefer it to the world in which she was born. They are wrong.

=============

Rebecca is twelve and she wants to be Stacy Mason when she grows up. Her film blogging has continued, but her passions have shifted to a taste for the thrills and exploration of the Irwins.  
She spends hours in chatrooms poring over footage and learning what works and what doesn’t. She dreams of winning a Golden Steve-o, of exploring some of the great abandoned zones. The pre-Rising movie posters on her walls are joined by maps of places like Yosemite, Yellowstone, Alaska, New Orleans, and India. She has an autographed picture of Selena Harris, the Irwin who holds a record-breaking five Golden Steve-o awards, and the letter that came back with it, saying that it sounded like she had a “real spirit of adventure”. It’s her most prized possession. 

Someday, she thinks, someday she’ll be the one making the news for finding the wild places of the world and poking them with a stick. Someday it’ll be her atop a jeep defending against wave after wave of the undead. Someday she’ll be the person she knows she could be. She just has to wait.

=============

Becks is fourteen, and has been calling herself Becks online for six months now, if not in public. It started out as a way of identity obfuscation: Becks was her online self - the self that talked about journalism and who commented on the videos and blogs of the Irwins and who absorbed every piece of information she could, in hopes that someday she might get to use it. But the more she uses it, the more she realizes that it’s Rebecca that is the mask, and that Becks is the true self underneath. 

=============  
Becks is sixteen, and is ditching her own coming-out ball to go shooting. She’s been buying rifles with her birthday money for the past few years, laundering the money by buying clothes her mother would approve of and then returning them for cash. The resulting funds go to acquiring her small arsenal and to shooting lessons so she will know how to use them. She’s not the only one who does this - her “archery lessons” are attended by Emma Claremont and the Moulton-Marston twins as well - but she’s the only one who doesn’t see it as just an illicit thrill. Laundering money, clandestine shooting lessons, hiding everything your parents might disapprove of - it’s not the best of strategies, but when your parents are so fundamentally opposed to who you are and what you love, you do what you can to survive. 

So instead of fighting with her parents over this party, like she has over every other one they’ve tried to bribe/beg/order her to attend, she lets them think they’ve won. She’s managed to get one of the family’s drivers to go along with her plan, and instead of taking her to the ball, the limousine is taking her to the shooting range instead, where clay pigeons and increasingly-difficult target situations await her.

Her parents will yell at her later - about the money wasted, about the shame she has brought on the family, about her disrespect for her place in society - but she will tune it out as she always has. Right now it’s just her, the gun, and the target. Everything else can wait.

=============

Becks is nineteen, and her switch from film to journalism at NYU has prompted a parental blowout of biblical proportions. In retrospect, telling them over Skype had not been the best idea, but giving her parents the metaphorical finger would have been less epic if she hadn’t combined it with showing off her new tattoo (a crossed chainsaw and cricket bat, with THE END IS EXTREMELY FUCKING NIGH under it in bold block letters tattooed across her left shoulder), new haircolor (bright pink), and the brand new assault rifle she bought with last year’s Christmas money. And now that she is finally free to be how she wants to be, well, why not make a dramatic exit? New style, a name that fits her much better than Rebecca ever did, and if her blogging makes her parents cringe and lie about what she’s doing when the neighbors ask? So much the better. She closes the Skype window and fires a last middle finger at the spectre of her parents and their precious respectability.  
=============

Becks is twenty when her blog, Charming Not Sincere, finally starts getting attention. There had been reports of river otters in upstate New York getting big enough to amplify, and urban legend or no, she decided to check it out for herself. She didn’t find the otters, but the ensuing video of her facing off against several post-amplification bobcats manages to get her plenty of notoriety. Her later venture to Yonkers as part of a multi-Irwin expedition gains her even more, as her gift for setting up shots and intercutting the expedition footage with some of the last known footage of the infamous “Slaughter at Yonkers” during the Rising shows that not only does she have the skill and sense of adventure needed to be an Irwin, but also a rare sense for style. She doesn’t get the Golden Steve-o that year, but she does get official disownment papers two days after the Yonkers footage is posted. In an odd way, it’s a better prize than she could have hoped for.

=============

Becks is twenty-two when she hears that After the End Times is hiring. She doesn’t look back.


End file.
